Elemental Defenses

Elemental Defenses are found on gear as both a raw stat and a percent ID.

Raw elemental defenses from each piece of gear are added together, and the percent ID modifies raw elemental defense to result in a final number.

Like raw hpr and health regen %, negative raw elemental defense will be reduced in magnitude (made less negative) by positive eledef %.

How They Work

Elemental Defenses are, at their core, a flat addition/reduction to a hit’s damage when hit by damage of that element. They work pretty much the same on both mobs and players.

Player Elemental Defenses (Players getting damaged)

Player elemental defenses are applied after defense and are affected by mob spell multipliers.

This means avoiding negative elemental defenses is very important, as the extra damage you take from negative eledefs is true damage. True as in ignores the defense skillpoint. Ouch.

Due to the relatively small elemental damage dealt by mobs (improved a bit ago but still), stacking positive elemental defense is almost always a complete waste.

Mob Elemental Defenses (Players damaging)

Spell multipliers and weapons’ attack speed modifier affect eledef damage from spells. A water damage meteor from a super fast wand against a mob with -100 water defense would do

100 x 5 (spell mult) x 4.3 (attack speed modifier) = 2150 extra damage

while a water damage meteor from a super slow wand against the same mob would do

100 x 5 x 0.51 = 255 additional damage.

It goes both ways. If the mob had positive 100 water defense, you’d lose that much damage instead of gaining it. Super fast abuses negative eledefs, but gets abused by positive eledefs.

Spell conversion (the partial neutral to elemental damage change on spells) activates the same bonus damage against elemental weaknesses. The weird part comes when there’s a weapon with no neutral damage- spell conversion still applies as 0 damage, and that 0 damage spell conversion can abuse weaknesses of that element.

With the strength/dexterity changes to affect final damage, they affect elemental defense bonus damage as well.

Again, the amount of damage you deal doesn’t affect negative elemental defense bonus damage. Doing any amount of that element will work, even zero.